Chapters (9)
Clearly something momentous must have happened—Mrs Raffald did not habitually give my son orders—but I increasingly did not care what it was. I said, ‘Let’s have just one more drink’, and I wondered briefly what Monica would do with the baked meats—but baked meats were what you had at funerals. This was to have been a wedding. I fell asleep reflecting that while weddings could be definitely cancelled, funerals could only be postponed.
I never really knew exactly what had happened, although I remember Mrs Raffald uttering the word ‘summerhouse’, and experiencing a swift, hallucinatory image: a sense of déjà vu which would have rocked me back on my heels if I had not been sitting down. What she said, or hinted at, was not unexpected. I thought confusedly, ‘I know, I know, I saw them.’ Past and present were superimposed on each other, everything was repeated, nothing was new. Lili and Jack, Lili and Syl, Lili and all the devils in hell... Bless her. I never saw her again.
Syl refused to discuss the matter. He said there’d been a scene. They were all mad round there, and Margaret herself had turned out to suffer from religious mania. He said he was going to marry Miss Benson from the office.
‘Mrs Raffald,’ I said some time later, ‘did Lili...?’ But I didn’t really want to know. Details were unimportant and frequently distressing, and Mrs Raffald would not burden me with them. Anyway, perhaps I did know.
She said, ‘I’m not saying nothing. All I’m saying is she’ll never wear that hat again in public.’
And she laughed and laughed and laughed.